I always find it particularly interesting when I find a piece of media that doesn't do anything novel, but is wholly unique all the same. Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is that. It has made a clean, inviting home in its niche, and it is inviting you to come visit for a nice chat.

Momodora as a series does not bring any wild ideas to the metroidvania genre, but you do play as a priestess with a maple leaf for a weapon, and I'm fairly confident in saying it's the only metroidvania like that. These are games whose strengths are in how they tailored a set of existing gameplay ideas to the developers particular tastes. The appeal is less in discovering some new place to explore, but in exploring a familiar place in a different way. It's something fresh, but not something that requires you to learn a whole new way of living.

Moonlit Farewell is a what you'd expect from the genre, but it's not everything you'd expect from the genre. It's a carefully chosen subset of elements that are a result of the developer's limits and experience—having already released several games of this style and learning what they do and don't like to do.

This is a long-winded way of saying the game is a lightweight, streamlined, and polished metroidvania, and I quite like it for those qualities. Compared to Reverie Under the Moonlight, the previous in the series, it feels better to play, is more satisfying to play, sits at a perfect length, and maintained a pleasant experience for almost the entire runtime—though I'm sure my familiarities with the quirks of Reverie may have biased me a bit in that aspect.

Oh, and above all of that, this game is gorgeous and I adore the art style. I played it on a Steam Deck OLED and made sure to show it off to all my friends and family and they all quite agreed. The scenery, the effects, Momo's animations. It is all very pretty. The artist(s) should be proud.

From a gameplay side, I will say that I did find some of the boss fight balancing a bit uneven. Mostly dipping into a bit too easy on several of them. But one counter to that is that I seem to have become a bit of a power gamer over the last three years, and I found a particularly lethal combination of the traits available which the average player may not. The other counter is that easy is fine if it means it's staying smooth and relaxing.

Maybe it's the FromSoft brainrot that causes me to even feel the need to justify that, but there it is.

Whereas I would have only really suggested Reverie Under the Moonlight to people plumbing the depths of this genre niche, Moonlit Farewell has reached a point of polish and artistic appeal where I will happily recommend it to anyone. It is the type of game that—to me—justifies delving into a niche and which can introduce the curious to that kind of spelunking. It is a very nice little game and I would love to see more people appreciate it.

I've never seen so many unlocks of such variety in a game. It's a shame that so few developers take the diegetic approach to unlocking basic HUD elements like enemy healthbars and combo meters. Understandable from a practical perspective, but a shame.

As for the rest of this game... and it is a game not a VN... I went in thinking it would be like 90% reading given the 70-90 hour runtime, but oh no... it's like a clean 50/50 split, if not weighted towards gameplay depending on difficulty....

This game is a roller coaster. Except not the kind with any slow sections, but the kind that oscillates between a clean andrenaline rush and whipashing corkscrew nonsense. I can't ever remember being bored during the entire journey, but boy did it get me with shock value at times.

As a sci-fi I actually really enjoyed this narrative. It was a blast from the past of turn-of-the-millenia and early internet, both in that era's hopes and fears. There are concepts of technology, society, and existential quandries used here that I've seen very rarely in the last 20 years (not that I'm some super well read individual) and it uses them in interesting ways, even feeling downright novel at times. It tapered off a bit near the end for me, but I wager at the time the ending would have felt more fresh. Unfortunately some of the final additions are the concepts most overused today.

As a drama this story is nuts. And quite explicit. Like damn. I've never felt so emotionally detached from a group of characters while simultaneously genuinely enjoying and caring about them. It's like the feeling after you've come to terms with something awful happening to someone you care about—or them doing something awful in some cases. You just gotta accept reality, move on, and not become emotionally entrenched.

It does even justify most of those feelings thematically, as well. I'd say the central one here is "crushing nostalgia" as the characters find themselves so far removed from their days of innocence that even just thinking about the good days is a source of pain, even as they find few other motivations in life outside of vague desires to reclaim what once was. It's pretty interesting, and surprisingly not as diluted of an experience as something this long tends to be.

That said—and as I seem to say frequently—it's definitely a game from the early 00's VN scene.

Now, that aside, the biggest surprise here is the combat—the only gameplay but very prominent in its role. It's odd, but it's also oddly good. It's an isometric 2D brawler with 3D movement that plays like a classic arcade mecha game, only perhaps a bit more like an anime fighter than some of its peers.

Given the graphical limitations, you won't be speccing out your mech with specific parts, but you do get full customization of your attack mappings in a system reminiscent of the Tales of series. Each of the four attack buttons can have four attacks mapped to it, each triggering contextually based on range, movement, and a no-repeats limit on moves in one combo string.

The attacks available are varied and their roles in combat seem well defined. The mechanics of combat are nuanced and you can learn to take advantage of them as you work out your tactics to get really devastating effects. There are options you can spam defensively as well early on, but with learning you can take minutes long fights down to 10-15 seconds.

Or, if you're not into that kind of effort in your gaming, you can turn on Very Easy mode and blow everything up with rockets. Up to you. As far as I can tell there's only one or two unlockables that require a higher difficulty and I'm pretty sure they just unlock more combat stuff.

Enemy variety is also kind of absurd for how long the game is. Though I guess that can in part be attributed to it being two games combined into one at this point, but even then, there are probably around 40-60 unique enemies with animated sprites and attack patterns, then a good number of varients on top of that. They're rather creatively designed too, to the point of them sometimes being downright aggravating in that way things can be when creative types are doing what they feel like.

I never found one that didn't have some weakness you could exploit, though. I did get kind of sick of playing on hard by hour 50, though. It's a bit sadistic at times (and I got a new job, so my days of no-lifing games are on hold again).

This is all to say that if you're looking for some classic mech action gameplay and/or a sci-fi that is everything Virtues Last Reward wished it was, then this might be worth checking out.

Just be warned that wholesome feelings are few and far between in this tale.

I've never finished a classic Zelda game, but this game has a cute lil crow with a sward, so I'm preeety sure this is the better game.

I jest, but this really is a delightful little experience. It's smooth, it's pretty, it's well paced. It doesn't really take any risks as far as the game design is concerned—I can't think of anything particularly unique, in fact. But it chooses a good blend of concepts from its predecessors and executes on them with polish.

The main draw, in my eyes, is the world and aesthetic. I just love being a little salaryman crow who's job is to reap souls for a dilapidated bureau. Your little bird walk is adorable, the sward is delectably bright against the washed out world, the characters you meet are quirky and fun, and the eulogies given for every boss are actually quite touching.

Death's Door manages a surprisingly good balance of lighthearted and somber elements and that will probably be what keeps it in my mind as a warm memory for a good time to come.

A charming though uneven experience that captures a lot of the feel of the original Sonic titles and creates some genuinely exciting snapshots of gameplay. It's a little too faithful to the old style for my taste, however, particularly in its level design and use of screen real estate.

I did have some preconceptions about the game going in, but much to my suprise the opening monologue from our titular hero managed an impressive feat for the indie mascot platformer and it actually made me interested in the character and setting. Not in some deep or emotional way, but in a, "Ah, okay, this was made by someone real who cares about this and is having a lot of fun."

And by extension, it made we want to dig right in even if I'm frankly not the biggest fan of 2D Sonic games and picked it up out of a sense of curiosity after one friend's journey with the series.

The art style was also a bit of an unexpected hit. I'm not one to be nostalgic for the 8/16-bit era platformers that aren't called "Super Mario World" so it didn't hit immediately, but quite a few of the zones, backdrops, and sprites are quite well done and look great in motion. I'm also particularly fond of the animated cutscenes. While Pizza Tower is the newer release, I can't help but compare because the animation style is very clearly of a "cheap digital paint tool" style, but they also feel like the person making them has used that tool for a while.

It's a bit unfortunate to me, then, that this was not the title to convince that I'll ever be a big fan of how Sonic-style Platformers play. There were a few levels in the mid to late part of the game where I felt like I was starting to get it and it made a decent enough flow. Otherwise, some of my lingering issues with the genre were present here—and they certainly weren't helped by a handful of sections that used some naturally frustrating platforming tropes without the finesse to make it work.

For one, I'll never understand how a game designed around speed and flow does everything it can to make a player trip and stumble on their first playthrough. There's a physical limit to what a human can react to, and for visuals it's around 0.2 seconds.

To put it another way: if an unexpected object crosses the screen in 1 second, it will be 1/5th of the way across the screen before your brain registers its existence. The brain then has to decide the correct response. Now throw in a small multiple sources of surprise and potential conflicting response options, and the time needed to actually engage with the controls, and a half to full second to respond becomes likely.

Of course, people who play a lot of 2D platformers can short circuit most of the decision making with their reflexes and heuristics, but even then: if your player sprite is 1/6-1/5th from their edge of the screen, and the object is moving faster than than 1-screen-width-per-second, then that decision making time starts to evaporate quickly. And so playing the game well becomes impossible without trial and error.

Which you won't do, because the punishment for blunders is not severe enough to make you run it again and try to be better. You will just keep blundering along.

I should reiterate that this is a problem I have with a lot of retro sidescrollers. So don't take that as a slight against Spark alone. If you enjoy 2D sonic, you will have little issue here. I just think these games would be objectively better if they zoomed the visible space out a bit, ran at a minimum of 90fps, and had a bit more responsive camera look-ahead (it's never cool when your sprite sits at the bottom of the screen when you have to fall).

Sparks only sin here is emulating its heroes too closely.

Oh, and the time-gated platform sections. I will never like those.

The last thing I think I feel compelled to mention is the swappable, kirby-esque powers. I thought a lot of them were pretty fun, but unfortunately some of them were too fun and holding onto those ones when you're stumbling around is difficult. There was a sword that came with an acceleration buff and a wind hat that gave a passive double jump and float and had an ability that let you rocket yourself in any of the four cardinal directions.

Those two combined made the levels fluid and fun to the point where the game felt sluggish as soon as they were gone (after a good 6 stages with them).

In any case, the game is good, but it sits comfortably in its niche and isn't looking to move out aside from dipping its toes into its next door neighbor's pool. If you find the original Sonic games fun, this will be too. It's not my favorite cup of tea, but I hear the third game of the series is like Sonic Adventure, so I will be returning for that.

This game feels like it was stewed in the preserved essence of late 90s to early 00s Sci-Fi gaming. It was like my memories of playing MechAssault and watching the Zone of Enders demo were manifested into a modern reality. It is ultimately a simple game compared to the evolutions the medium has experienced since, but that means its elements have had time to ferment into a pungeant beauty.

This is a very retro title in its structure and gameplay. You progress through a series of self-contained missions in a mostly linear order with a few opportunities to switch up order or take a handful of mutually exclusive excursions. You get an opportunity to outfit your mech with a set of unlockable parts. Then you drop, zoom around for 2-10 minutes, finish one of a variety of mission objectives, and extract.

The story is told through comm voices and mission briefing videos. The controls are arcadey—almost exactly what I remember from an arcade PvP mech game once fights start in ernest. A single playthrough would be considered short these days and there's an emphasis on just replaying the single campaign or the PvP multiplayer if you want more. There's no inclusion of some "souls-like" element to the progression, either. You either restart the mission on death or restart from a checkpoint on the longer ones.

You can even run a mission select and go for S-ranks if you're so inclined.

At the high level, there's almost nothing "novel" in this game—as a game. Yet the details of its execution show the developers' years of experience and passion: missions are well paced and varied; the controls are responsive and well balanced in function versus simplicity; combat supports a wide variety of viable playstyles and challenges with a consistent set of rules that the player will gradually master over time.

It's a classic sort of game done really well and I really appreciate that.

It's also the most clear narrative I've seen in a FromSoft title to date (having never played another Armored Core game) and I was rather surprised how invested I was in the plot and characters—of which there were many and with good writing.

The delivery was often subtle and appropriately sober for the industrial-surrealist world it presents, but contrary to what I expected it stayed fairly grounded as a "human" drama and delievered its story beats in a pretty traditional, direct way. Per the studio's modern reputation, it does not spoon feed your every relevant detail, but its plot is driven by the goals and ambitions of its characters and their dialogue and development makes them feel very present in the game. Every mission you go on serves someone's agenda, and you'll see the effects of your actions—both good and ill—on each of the pilots and commanders you encounter.

It's not hard to tune out and play the part of the uncaring mercenary, if you so desire. True to the studio's style, it will not force you to sit and wait for the story to be told. However, the pacing and method of its delivery makes it easy to digest during normal gameplay, so even the most unga of action players will at least find the atmosphere of the action well setup as opponents scream, scoff, and applaud over a fight.

The visuals are one of the game's biggest strengths. One could say they are heavily influenced by the art of the Souls titles, and I'm sure some contingent of purists to the older AC games has some petty bone to pick. As for me:

These vistas slap.

These battles are beautiful.

And the audio accompanying the ballet feels just right. Punchy but not too exaggerated. Distinct sound cues that don't get lost to the trained ear, but still layer into the challenge. And the track "Rough and Decent." chef's kiss

The learning curve will be steep for a lot of players, especially those with no prior experience with arcade mech games or similar 6-directional action games. But if you're into that kinda of thing, this is a much needed hit in a AAA industry that has otherwise forgotten it. And if you wanna be into that kinda thing, this is a good start.

Frankly, this has reminded me that *I* want more of this in my life, and I should go play more of this series.

As an amateur game developer myself, I hold a great deal of respect for Studio Sai. I get anxious just mustering up the willpower to email indie publishers to try and get funding, and there they went (somehow) getting a big PlayStation feature. It's rather inspiring…

And now I say this with the mindset of an athlete set on surpassing those who come before…

I bet I can do better.

Someday 😂

Content wise, I actually found the game rather endearingly dorky and it even shows some real promise at moments. It's surprisingly well restrained for how big of a project it became and it doesn't feel unfinished or rushed.

It's just rough

The biggest, biggest problem for me was how they managed transitions. From my experience with the Unity engine, I suspect that they used individual "Scene" assets (Unity's concept of a level) not only to manage which environments were loaded, but also to "organize" each small section of the cutscenes. Or otherwise they tied their save system to a full scene reload because lordy that loading spinner has more screen time than the main character and yet it's only ever there for a second or two at a time. This turns almost every scene transition into a slow fadeaway and music cut which drops whatever atmosphere the scene was trying to build.

I have friends who say they didn't notice and enjoyed the game, so I can't say it ruins the game for everyone, but it was incredibly jarring for me.

Combat is also a bit rough, though it can also work fairly nice at times. The use of hit stop is excessive and some of the frequently used ability animations are far too long relative to the rest of combat. You're usually invincible during the animations in question, so it's not a matter of balance but responsiveness and flow. Input in general is a bit finicky feeling, though I think half of that at least is because of the hit stops eating inputs and requiring you to mash to use your moves reliably.

Other than that, it delivers what it promises on. So if it seems vaguely entertaining to you, either legitimately or as dating sim adjacent junk food, it's not the worst you could pick. If you have weeb friends, it may aslo be worth playing if only for the conversation and story around it.

The capstone of the trilogy and the payoff for everything that comes before it. Even better combat design, a setting as charming as ever, and satisfying conclusions to the narrative threads the series was weaving.

It’s good.

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Part 1 - Prelude to the Fallen
Part 2 - Mask of Deception

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I don’t believe I have too much to add on this final part, as the trajectory of the series was set with Mask of Deception and I can happily report that the launch was good.

Using the same technical foundation as its predecessor, there are few bits of polish and shine added but nothing major. Perhaps one thing to note is that—with their newly acquired confidence in their turn-based skirmish gameplay—there’s a lot more of it. New actions, new equipment options, more robust arenas, a set of trial missions, and overall the most full feeling gameplay experience yet.

That comes at no cost to the narrative, either, as it picks up right where Mask of Deception left off and goes in almost exactly the direction it promised. It doesn’t entirely lose the lighthearted charm of the previous game but—as I loved with Prelude—the weightier side of the story stays always in the background adding another layer of color to events.

It could be that in the last year I’ve finally become a sincere person. Whether I have or not, however, I found myself getting consistently swept right along into the struggles and triumphs of the cast.

And as a war story, it’s also quite adeptly put together at a technical level. It doesn’t really want you to focus on the hard details of the logistics and politics, but what it does show was sufficient enough that I could buy into decisions characters make and the strategies they employ. It’s a bit of a less is more approach, but for a story with as many elements as this, finding that balance between detail and illusion is the only way to make it work.

To levy some critique, I do think the last act suffers a bit on pacing and some of my callousness as a reader did make it hard to trust the vision in the moment, but the final conclusion was satisfying and felt true to the themes the series had been operating on since the start.

So, yes. I do recommend this game quite highly.

Bringing a much needed revamp to the tactics gameplay, Mask of Deception is a decidedly more ambitious followup to Utawarerumono. You likely won’t feel that ambition until halfway in, but it’s a fun romp up throughout and by the midpoint you’ll begin to see what it was all for.

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(I played the 3 main Utawarerumono games back to back, so this effectively a “Part 2” to my series review. Part 1 can be found here.)

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It’s rather impressive to me how consistent Mask of Deception feels as a followup to Prelude to the Fallen. There were about 12-13 between the original releases of the two titles, and yet the art and writing all feel like natural continuations. The exception being combat which came back much better than it’s first iteration.

The way I see it, is that Aquaplus pivoted into more traditional JRPG combat in terms of the flow and challenge, but kept the party sizes and positioning elements of a tactics game. The result is something more focused on being a “skirmish” battle game. Rarely are there any major environmental gimicks or special objectives, instead the challenge of combat lies in the flow and dance of units that results from type matchups and using their varied attack types in their optimal situations.

The active input system was improved as was the Zeal resource. Characters now have 3-5 different, multi-stage attack/support skill routines which get more complex as they level up. Each stage of these moves has different properties and build or expend Zeal in different ways, and the active inputs are how you traverse these routines, both choosing when to cut them short and eking more damage and Zeal out of them with critical timings.

Individual attacks in a series will have different areas of effect and secondary effects. The most effective ones will probably cost more zeal or have specific range requirements. Some have secondary effects that are life-saving in one scenario but will get you killed in others. And even the standard routines stay interesting by having the most “hidden” critical points you can exploit for a bit more mileage and access to a character’s finisher abilities in the late game. And even on defense there are now active inputs, though those trigger mostly on random chance (there are equipment options to tweak the odds, however).

While the effect is far more subtle, the arenas you fight in are improved as well. The best of them won’t be until Mask of Truth, but even here they introduce a “height” variable to the grid along with characters with variable “jump” distances. Combined with better use of impassable terrain and the other combat elements promoting more movement, the arenas provide a firm foundation to the encounters. They don’t make the fights on their own, but they’re pleasantly relevant to proceedings.

One thing some may find disappointing is that fights never have nail-biting tension to them. This is largely due to the player’s ability to rewind a fight whenever and to wherever they wish to change a decision or retry a routine. Considering how many elements are at play and how the game is still primarily narrative focused, I think this was a necessary and welcome addition to the game. There is still challenge to combat, especially on Hard, as sometimes life and death for a unit can come down to whether or not you let them go too far into an attack routine or use up too much zeal. Sometimes your failures can originate from 30 actions back and you have to decipher where you went wrong. Ultimately, though, this remains a low-pressure series when it comes to gameplay.

So then, if the combat is still engineered at its core to support a narrative experience, does that narrative justify it? In my opinion, yes, though I will admit that there were times early in that I was worried it was going to veer too far into the more slice-of-life inspired elements. Mask of Deception takes its time to set its stage. There is plenty going on in the moment to moment, so I wouldn’t call it boring, but coming right off of Prelude I was feeling the itch to get into the thick of the war drama sooner. By the end, however, I felt a bit silly being so impatient.

Most writers seek to make their readers attached to their characters so they can buy into the plot and its emotional beats. The more you show the readers who the characters are, the more likely they are to sympathize and become attached. Spend too much time on that, however, and you risk losing the readers who are looking for a consistent central narrative to follow and more weighty stakes. Mask of Deception takes that risk because it doesn’t just want the reader invested in the life of its protagonist, it wants the reader to understand exactly what that life means to the protagonist.

It might not payoff for everyone, but it really did for me. I’m getting a bit into Mask of Truth saying this, but the character growth across the two games was top-notch. This is a tale of characters with conflicting wishes who lack the strength to fulfill both their duties and desires. So, they must make a sacrifice somewhere—and they do.

It’s also a story that made me giggle a lot. I might be alone in this, but its sense of humor in the lighter parts of the story felt very Konosuba-esque. This game hits a wide gamut of tones in the adventure it takes you on, and yet all of those pieces feel connected in the end.

So, if you got through Prelude to the Fallen and enjoyed your time there, then set this title high on your priority list. They’re delightful. And if you just need one excuse to help you push through Prelude, then let this game be that excuse.

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Part 3 - Mask of Truth

While its turn-based tactics ruleset will likely leave a tactics aficionado disappointed, Prelude to the Fallen’s decision to stick close to its original 2002 design is also one of its greatest strengths as a narrative focused title. Its early history inspired setting is charming, its characters both fun and robust, and its plot is sufficiently weighty for the war drama it tells without indulging in unsufferable pessimism.

(I ended up binging the three Utwarerumono games back to back, so this review is effectively a "Part 1" of a review of the series as a whole.)

As a beginning to the series, Utawarerumono serves as a solid foundation. It has the markers of inexperience natural to a developer's first forray into a genre, but Leaf played it safe to positive effect by staying 60% in the realm of the Visual Novels they had built their reputation on. And, at least in Aquaplus's remake, the combat system’s safety means it’s also never frustrating and maintains the flow of the story even when their encounter design is at its weakest.

Combat is fairly archetypal FF Tactics style, and the most complex it gets is in managing the facing/flanking, unit element matchups, and a mana-like Zeal resource which effects what abilities your units have available. There’s a fun mechanic around timing button presses to the attack animations to get “criticals” and juice a little extra effect out of your units abilities. But, with how minor of a role Zeal makes in the moment-to-moment in this title, the timing game doesn’t reach the impact it has in the next two titles.

The combat system might have been quite fun as it is, but unfortunately its weakest link is simply encounter design. Arenas are sparse on environmental hurdles and if you have any basic grasp on positioning and target priority, the game will rarely give you any higher challenges. Despite this, I appreciate Leaf/Aquaplus’s decision in context. These days I personally favor more cutthroat turn-based combat, but I remember when early RPGs would derail my ability to experience the story with their random difficulty spikes. Leaf wanted to tell a tale first and foremost, and the combat was an experiment to enhance that. If the combat had stayed this way in the following titles, I would be more critical, but thankfully it did not.

As for that narrative, it follows a sort of episodic/historical structure covering the establishment of a small nation after a rebellion and the series of conflicts that shape its place in the world. Yet it’s equally a character focused tale following the tight knit circle leading the young nation. The regular breaks from the war drama to take time on low-stakes character and world building scenes will likely make it feel a bit slower paced at first. Yet, I was consistently surprised by how much of plot threads which seemed rather trivial at first unfolded into much more intricate events that weaved into the central narrative quite nicely.

I think what makes it work so well is that it is a story which rarely makes empty promises. When there’s fighting, people get hurt and die; when there’s political maneuvering, reputations are harmed and enemies are made; when times are tough, people make decisions they can’t take back; when there’s love, the population number goes up.

It may be that I’ve simply spent too much time in the orbit of modern fantasy anime, but there’s a very refreshing early-00s VN feeling to this story with its writing and subject matter. With the minor edits made in the 2006 iteration to bevel out the egregiously explicit early-00s VN elements, it comes off as a solid balance of fun and mature (and definitely not always both at once).

Once the ride gets going in earnest—and it does start a bit slowly—Utawarerumono offers an engaging series of twists and turns with many organic layers to its characters and intrigue. It’s not a flawless story, but it’s an effective one and I found myself well attached to the world by the end of the first act.

I imagine one element that many people will get hung up on is the more… harem-y setups, which is most prominent in this title of the three. And…

Fair

But a wise man once said that you can know the true virtue of a Harem Anime’s soul by the strength of its male supporting cast. And Utawarerumono does right by its men. The bonds of fraternity get their due development. Even apart from that, they also somehow manage to fit some real meaningful character development into most of the romantic scenes, well beyond the surface level appeal.

I have to dance around spoilers for my examples here, but there were a few subplots in particular that start out like setups to a rom-com gag, only to then closeline you in the gut with the sincerity or seriousness of them. One that got me was a “baby in the basket” setup that gets into boundaries one must put on their parental instincts. Then there’s another where a character’s drunken plea to the main character could have been ripped right out of a comedy as a setup—and it is quite light spirited in the moment—but in context it leaves a melancholy aftertaste, and that subplot ultimately blooms into the story’s most bittersweet tragedy and a major setup for the rest of the series.

So, yes, it’s harem-y, but it’s not a power fantasy. (How the sweaty otaku’s it originally preyed upon for sales in 2002 reacted to it, I can’t say)

In regard to the art and sound of the game: it was one of the main factors to me starting the series and it delivered throughout. I adore the character art. They hit such a fun balance between fantastical and period appropriate in the designs and the range of unique-yet-cohesive feeling characters is impressive. The illustrations, including the backgrounds, are soft and natural, yet clean and precise. Every inch of the screen adds to the warmth of its atmosphere, and the music carries you into it.

I do have to admit I’m not a huge fan of the 3D art used for the tactics gameplay sections. It was a Vita game at launch, however, so there’s little to do about that. It’s a practical and efficient style for a tactics game on a small screen and it’s done well enough to be inoffensive. This sentiment stays the same through all three of the modern ports of the games. The rest of the presentation, however, is wonderful. And that is also true for the whole trilogy.

So, would I recommend this to Turn-Based Tactics fans? Not on the merit of its combat alone. If you’re casual fan then you’ll probably have fun enough with it, but regardless, this is a game you’d realistically be picking up for the story. I can say the gameplay gets better in the next two, and it certainly does, but really this title is a good test for whether or not you want to continue. The amount of writing per game only goes up from here as well (though not dramatically).

Who this game is really for is anyone looking for a good war drama with lots of fun character development and is appreciative of the fantasized Kofun-era-Japan-esque setting (I’m not an expert so feel free to correct me there). The fact that it also then becomes an engaging tactics JRPG in the next two titles is just an added bonus for sticking with it.

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Part 2 - Mask of Deception
Part 3 - Mask of Truth

SOMA was… kind of relaxing. Obviously not when the monsters are chasing you. But, when the quiet and the dark set in and you explore the crumbling underwater facilities, occasionally chatting with the single other lucid entity in the depths… it's quite calming.

I started on the standard mode, but after a while I found the stealth more of a nuisance than tense so I just restarted in the "Safe" mode and focused on the story. To my surprise, the game still managed to freak me out pretty well at parts with just sheer set design and soundscape. I may have even put off finishing the game for a month just because I found the noises the creatures made so unsettling, but I won't admit to that here.

Even if that alleged event happened, it never really spoiled my overall feeling that the game is ultimately very low-key. The dialogue in the game I think being the main reason why this ends up being the case. If the game had never introduced Catherine, it would have gone on to feeling like a fairly generic haunted house adventure dodging monsters, solving puzzles, and soaking up the creepy environment.

But then she's introduced and the whole scenario is recontextualized with the narrative details that come with her.

I won't go into those details for sake of keeping readers fresh to their own interpretation of the story here, but I will say that the tone of the dialogue was entirely unexpected to me for a horror game, and yet it felt so thematically fitting that it worked to create something that worked so well for me.

I'm not entirely in love with some of the ways the game doles out the details of the backstory and world, with frequent use of audio logs you can't listen to without stopping or greatly slowing down. But at least the pace is set properly such that I would usually listen anyway without too much grumbling.

The other major factor in the rhythm of the game was the way you interacted with its elements. Every mechanical interaction (aside from simple buttons) requires a small mouse motion to follow through. I wish the sensitivity on it was just a touch higher, but otherwise I found these interactions smooth and cathartic to execute. They made what could have just been menial box ticking to continue the game into a fun and tactile little performance.

Isn't too much more to say. SOMA is a well put together exploration game that does well to capture both the peace and terror one can find on the ocean floor. That duality is something I've rarely heard of let alone experienced in a horror game (not that I play many) and I think with the Safe mode letting players tune the balance of that, I can heartily recommend this to anyone looking for something more narrative and ambiance driven—and don't mind a few spooks.

While not all of its ambitions are executed with crystal clear success, “Root Double” knew to draw a line somewhere and it is satisfyingly complete tale for its constraint. With a strong, tension filled opening sucking you into the mysteries of its plot and good emotional payoffs at the end for its likable cast, the structural weaknesses are easy to forgive.

The setup of this Adventure title is camped firmly in the framework of the “escape room” subgenre anyone who’s played Danganronpa or the Zero Escape series would be familiar with. A group of people all with very different circumstances one day find themselves stuck in dangerous place with the near impossible task of escaping—all while clashing personalities and growing suspicions complicate their ability to work together.

It’s a genre that balances many elements—tension, mystery, character writing—and it succeeds in delivering on these elements just not consistently.

The tension starts high and well paced, but then it will take too long of a break or interrupt at an odd time around the middle to late parts of the story. Never so badly that it can’t recover, but enough that you’re aware it happened.

The questions the story poses are often fairly small and predictable, but in their sheer number it’s still compelling to see how they all fit together into one whole.

The character writing is not often subtle, but there’s still a kind of gracefulness in its openness. There’s a way in which it plays obvious sleights of hand and yet the challenge isn’t to guess what trick it hid. The challenge is to continue trusting that somewhere behind the curtain is a detail that will make things turn out the way you hope they will.

What this story does do consistently well, is detail. Detail in the setting. Detail in the characters. Detail in the action. Detail in the mystery. By the end of it I couldn’t think of one interesting plot thread that wasn’t resolved in a satisfying way or any plot convenience so contrived it breaks the illusion.

If you comb through with the intent to find them, you likely will. But even history is subject to scrutiny. The point here is that for whatever Root Double lacks in plating and portion size control, the narrative is still a satisfying dish from a competent chef.

Quite unfortunately, the singular interactive element is decidedly the weakest ingredient despite having the most promise. Rather than picking from a set of clear-cut text responses at the games branch points, the act of picking itself is a small puzzle through the “Senses Sympathy System” where you set sliders for each relevant character to the branch to determine… your general positive/negative impression of them? The game is rather vague about it, but your intuition is rarely far off.

The decisions made will generally favor the viewpoint of the characters whose setting is High and disfavor the view of whoever is Low. However, this often results in two problems: one, a lot of the best decisions to make for the Grand Ending is to just put everyone high; two, when this isn’t the case the lack of definition on what it means makes it feel inconsistent.

Additionally, there are 9 possible values for each slider, but in all put a very small handful of MANY decisions made over the game, the game is only checking LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH. And it’s frankly too abstract to reason with it besides trial and error.

I tried the first route of the game without a guide rather excited to figure it out, but by the end of that (which is only a third of the game) the structure of the story and the amount of experimentation needed just felt at odds.

The graduated selections promise a lot of small variations. But, realistically it just doesn’t fit with how long the story is, how many correct decisions need to be made to reach the true end, and how little time a reader can reasonably be expected to spend on any one decision. There are ultimately only really 2-3 story changes possible per decision and most are very minor. Though, to its credit, it does a good job of telling the player how important each one is.

This isn’t really a problem unique to Root Double, however, so while disappointing, I wouldn’t turn away from it for that. I imagine few people would even read through a very popular title like Steins;Gate without a guide for its obscure decision making system.

I very much would recommend Root Double to anyone looking to get an escape room drama fix. It’s more grounded and less pessimistic than many of its peers, which I’m personally a fan of, but there’s also plenty of near-future sci-fi thrills for those who enjoy that. It’s a bit more of a time commitment than it perhaps should have been, so be prepared to do some skimming depending on how well you’re following the plot. But, ultimately, I think its worth it in the end.

Writing this after 2 complete runs and before I find out there's some secret meta game with those grey worlds that I didn't understand.

This game is just as delightful as y'all on this site made it out to be.

Drax and DeemonAndGames have already written reviews that do well to summarize all of the analysis I could muster about it. In truth there isn't a large volume that can be said about it, as it is such a distillation of one concept executed in such lovably demented way. Either you'll get it or you won't, but if you like "games" you probably will and it's absolutely worth trying for yourself to see.

So call this another scouting report: yes, the rumors are true. The game is good.

The concept behind Eternal Darkness is one I've found intriguing since first mention, and I can see glimpses of the fully realized vision in what was released, but the execution is quite unfortunately marred by what I consider poor pacing and balance issues. Still, I think many of its ideas should be remembered and retried and I would love to see some successor some day perfect the framework Silicon Knights established back in 2002.

This game gets a lot right on the fundamentals: the sound is moody and the use of stereo effects is laudable; the art is effective, cohesive, and distinct; the composition is creative and theme appropriate; and even more than all those the game actually feels nice to play while still clearly being an Adventure game first.

The narrative is probably one of the weaker parts but that seems to depend on how you feel about horror. Personally, I find Lovecraftian horror loses almost all of its distinct allure once you can stab your way back to sanity—so it was a bit of a wash for me. I'd say, "But at least it didn't get in the way of gameplay too much," but that's actually part of my biggest criticism of the game.

The game has too much (uninteresting) gameplay.

While the gameplay mechanics are polished and smooth, what they are not is balanced or deep. By 3-4 chapters into the 12 chapter affair you've seen all of the puzzles, spells, and enemy types you're going to be tackling with slight alterations of for 95% of the runtime.

There are a few suprises and new things later on, but by the time they show I had already become a well oiled machine on the combat and spell casting side, and the challenge faced by most of the puzzles was not in working out a solution but in even realizing the game had a puzzle for you in the first place. Often it would drop vague "hints" after 3-4 unrelated challenges since you briefly glimpsed whatever environment the hint pertained to, and so all that information would just get lost entirely.

The amount of unique content in the game isn't really the problem here, though, the problem I see is how it's doled out. Through the 11-12 hours you spend playing, hardly 5 minutes goes by without encountering yet-another-group-of-zombies. After chapter 3, resource management becomes entirely trivialized by the magic system. You almost always have access to an effective melee weapon for dealing with standard enemies, meaning all the special weapons are easily saved for the few powerful baddies. You see the same baddies so many times that there's no way you won't get efficient at killing them.

What is horrifying is often correlated to what is unknown, and Eternal Darkness will not let things stay unknown. You will pass through the trapped room until you're memorized the layout. You will fight the big boi until you've got a perfect kill routine. You will solve Red/Green/Blue puzzles like you're studying for a programming interview.

I haven't really meant to rag on the game this much. I'm fairly convinced my experience is largely a matter of my perspective on the genre, but I think I'm just really upset at how pointless the "Sanity" mechanic ended up being.

It seems so promising early on, but then they do two horrible, horrible things to it: directly tie it to health so you're pressured into keeping it topped off since it drains so quickly; and make it trivial to top off with a cheap spell (even mid fight if you're quick). I can count on one hand the number of times I remember seeing the "Insanity Events" this game is lauded for. Three of them were before chapter 3.

If there was a difficulty option, I swear I picked Hard but now I feel unsure.

I wish I had more to say about the game, but sadly I feel like I experienced it as one would a play from backstage. I can see the actors putting in a lot of effort that could make a fun show, but I definitely did not experience the vision as intended.

A pleasantly smooth and hyperactive shoot-em-up with a unique visual style and layers of novetly to the narrative that make it a bit more than just a retro-inpspired title. While certainly not easy, it pushes you onward with the pure satisfaction of the gameplay and heaps of upbeat energy.

I'm not quite sure I'll see the very end of it any time soon, however, as the final strech of this game makes a considerably bigger ask of the player than anything before it. Saying much more, however, would be a spoiler and I do think even just attempting once is an experience worth the admission.

The SHMUP genre is not one I've engaged with often and have generally found rather offputting for its apparent tendency towards sadistic game design. That might seem hypocritical as someone who enjoys FromSoft games and Roguelikes, but its the added strain of constant twitch reflexes and pixel perfect allowances that made the mix too much for me, generally.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to find that ZeroRanger strikes a nice balance between testing your skill and giving you a boost when your momentum starts to sputter out. The two primary tools it uses being a generous checkpoint system and a "continue" system that gives the player more to work with the more they play.

The only tradeoff the player makes for using both is that it drastically lowers your score potential, so people going for bragging rights will naturally avoid them and take the full challenge while us normies can plug along to the end of the game at a decent pace…

Until the aforementioned final stretch. To the game's credit, I don't think I would have the developer do it any differently. It's pretty unique and bold. But "unique and bold" naturally limits who is going to be able to appreciate it fully.

Alas, at this point in my life it's a challenge I'm not willing to commit to seeing through right here and now. But maybe one day—I did eventually come back and finish the last boss of Dark Souls after 7~8 years, afterall. And, I do still really enjoy playing the game, but I'm more interested in moving on to the next on my stack now.

Definitely will recommend for anyone looking for a novel burst of high-intensity action, whether you're used to the shmup formula or not. The game is full of passion and it bleeds into you as you play.

    Phantom Liberty was in several ways a solid step towards solving what I believe to be Cyberpunk 2077's greatest weakness: a lack of cohesion. Overall, I would certainly call it a memorable and impressive experience—with immaculate visual flair in particular. But, it also slips nearly as frequently and reminds me that the core design goals are oil and water at the end of the day. Yet, I can still appreciate the effort CDPR has put in to stir the beaker for a few moments of a clean blend.

For this review, however, I'll stick to just my points on the expansion content itself.

    The Game is gorgeous

First and foremost and legitimately the greatest pull for me: the visuals. Sweet gotdamn this game already looked good, but the lighting work and scenery composition in Dog Town is—mwah—chef's kiss. This isn't just about fidelity (though running it with Ray Traced reflections at a solid framerate is certainly a plus) but the sheer flair of the visual design. The colors are vibrant but not over saturated, they fit the moods of the scenes, and almost tell the whole story of the game on their own.

It's a gorgeous game, and it's going to be a lot of fun running the experimental Path Tracing renderer next time I upgrade my rig. It's actually "playable" already on that setting… outside of Dog Town

Unfortunately, Dog Town takes all of the gains on performance stability that CDPR attained with the base game content and throws most of them out the window. The new areas are more complex than the base game, so it's not for nothing, but a little bit of a shame that we're halfway back to 2020 performance-wise.

    The gameplay has made some progress

Level design here is a step up from before—most of the time—with environments having a lot more character navigation-wise and feeling a lot more… "independent." In the base game, mission spaces felt like they were squeezed into the gaps of the open world. Important objectives were often a stone's throw away from where you entered a location to the point making the whole proceedings feel like you just walked into a convenience store instead of some secret lab or PMC base.

It's… still weak when comparing this game to an immersive sim, though. And I think that is an apt comparison since it gives all the signs that it's trying to tap into that kind of design.

One particular part of the main quest really exemplifies this problem. I'll avoid spoilers, but essentially what happens is you're given the option to talk or go in loud, but if you're paying attention to the environment you'll also find an option to sneak in. Great!… Which leads right into a scripted pitfall and you're back to fighting.

Some parts were better, but despite the "subterfuge" theme of the expansion and plentiful character ability options for stealth, the encounter design neither gives you much to play with nor changes the results in any satisfying way.

    The story is... well I'm not quite sure yet

Narratively, I'm less sure about how I feel about this game. One thing I can say for certain is that some of the conversations and set pieces are quite phenomenal taken individually. It's just how it all glues together that I'm less decided on. I'm tempted to say it has the same cohesion problem that the game design does… but on the other hand the messiness and lack of clear opinions on the themes it plays with feels right—in a frustrating way.

I think I have a personal hang up with the narrative of Cyberpunk. One I didn't have in my original playthrough of the base game, but has emerged on the replay: I don't know who "V" is.

The short version for now is quite simply that I always felt a conflict between what I would do and who the narrative believes V to be. This was a minor issue in the base game, but it's amplified three-fold in the context of a spy-thriller. It's a story full of nuance and thin-lines, but you as an actor in this story are stuck only able to make 2-3 fairly disparate decisions.

By the end, some of them shake out a bit better with follow up decisions, but the routes to get there put me out of sync with the story until then. As stated, though, that's probably mostly a personal hangup.

Objectively, I just have some fairly petty and likely fairly baseless complaints about the political-tactical maneuvering some of the characters make. But the world just works different in CP77 so I'll ignore those.

    I wouldn't call the game "fixed" but it's still good

In the end, if you enjoyed the base game, this is a good extra hit of that. If you need more eye candy in your gaming, this is that. If you didn't enjoy CP77 the first time, this won't change your mind, I don't think.