Wow, this game leaves a deep impression. The beautifully atmospheric music and the incredibly distinct Game Boy x 90s PC-like hand-drawn graphics and colour palette completely engross you into the world and really make you feel like you're just spacing out in an a timeless alternate dimension as you play the game. All the character designs are extremely appealing and befit the lo-fi look so excellently, that even though the number of frames used is quite small I simply never got tired of looking at the same image for hours on end. Story-wise, this was definitely not the type of mystery I had expected at first, and I did leave with a handful of unanswered questions, but it was genuinely fun to learn about the impressively fleshed-out world of the game.

Albeit left with a super messy toilet roll dropped more times than I have or ever will drop a toilet roll in my life, overall, I enjoyed this peculiar one-man Switch project that even 7 years in stands out as one of the most inventive uses of the Joycon to date. It often presents a real challenge, which by the end I found amplified by the extra traction on my ravaged toilet roll and the exhaustion from moving the heavy box that was the only suitable surface I found, yet the simple satisfaction of completing precise manoeuvres in overcoming imprecise controls encouraged me to persevere. The world needs more creative and experimental games like this.

This game looks incredible, has a lot of cool ideas, it's fun from start to finish and it is admittedly the most polished 2D Mario on consoles since Mario World 2 in many ways. However, I can't help but feel a little unsatisfied having 100%d this in roughly 10 hours. I can't say whether it's the small amount of content, too much linearity, soundtrack that is great but not quite memorable, or lack of much difficulty at all outside of the very final level, but I certainly wouldn't put it in the same tier as Mario 3 or either Mario World. Also, while it is neat in plaza levels, I think it was a missed opportunity to make the online functionality a pseudo easy mode.

Still a Kirby game on its face borrowing good things from the other GBA titles, and its style of cooperative multiplayer has the potential to be a lot of fun. Gradually exploring and uncovering more of the map as a team has its moments. But unfortunately, it's bogged down by a major lack of polish in basically every department, the most egregious among them being level design. Some other poor choices such as forcing synchronization on the pause (map) screen for all players and battery management only cause frustration for the multiplayer experience.

A Japanese cult-classic video game and it's not hard to see why.

A relatively simple but very memorable game with a lot of polish, Irisu Syndrome! really fires on all cylinders with addictive gameplay, an absolutely outstanding soundtrack filled with melancholy tunes you could spend a whole rainy day just listening to, and a genuinely intriguing story unbefitting for a puzzle game of this type that maximizes your immersion as the mystery unfolds by encouraging you to look outside of just the game window for more.

As a fan of many other types of colour-matching puzzle games, the dynamic style of gameplay in this is particularly refreshing, giving you very tight control over the descent and spin of the falling pieces and having a superb balance of risk and reward. Thus, although pattern recognition of the falling blocks is still an element, you get a euphoric sense of improving your finesse in moving pieces between tighter spaces and in more precise directions over time like an action game.

It was definitely worth getting all the endings and files for this and I will have to start a search for more puzzle games that scratch this same itch.