Perfectly fit my needs as an evening puzzle before bed time. The gameplay has you controlling different colored blob-men from a starting configuration to a final resting place, with some color-coded bridges they can cross, and some color-coded doors they cannot. There are 40 puzzles in total that took me about 6 hours to get through.

There are just enough gimmicks for variety for each new set of levels, such as primary color blob-men merging together to create secondary colors, which changes which doors and bridges they can access. Some of the solutions are not straight forward, and I only felt I was properly adapting my mindset towards how to approach the game by its final puzzles.

There is a "story" in the sense that there is flavor-text between levels - I was happier the more I ignored it, and it does not impact gameplay at all. The text feels more like setting the mood for the game, as atmosphere is one of its larger selling points. The same gameplay could have easily been accomplished with lines and dots, but the presentation really punches up the experience.

In my rating system, 2 stars represent an average, C-grade game. I award She Remembered Caterpillars 3 stars as a B-rank game. With no real fail state, an easy reset button, and a delightful, vibrant art style, it was a relaxing experience that provided just the right level of engagement to see me want to finish. I did get stumped on a couple puzzles more than once, but often coming back the next day shifted my perspective enough to solve them in minutes. An easy recommendation to fans of unique puzzlers.

I put 400 hours into this so I'll cut to the chase to let new players know what they're in for.

You'll grind to get new gear to grind to get new gear.
That's the entire game.

The combat and movement are smooth enough that you'll mindlessly keep doing it but sooner or later you'll find out how soul-sucking and vapid this game actually is.

This is probably the best game that I’ve repeatedly bounced off of because I didn’t really like the gameplay that I’ve played. I bought it around launch and just finished it… now.

Like, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. The presentation rules! The music’s great (especially that final boss theme!), the full voice acting is some good stuff, the point and click town segments are really flavorful and fun… and boy, the character portraits! Honestly, while I don’t necessarily dislike 3H’s artist, I wish they’d had Echoes’ artist on for more than just this game. I’ve enjoyed their work on multiple series and it would’ve been nice if they got to keep going. I also love the CG cutscene style, which is some of the nicest 3D anime stuff I’ve seen. It’s also nice to have the same localization team as Awakening back in the saddle, as they’ve got that good spice to them.

I feel like this game is in kind of a weird place as a remake, though, because that foundation both helps and hinders the game. FE Gaiden is definitely one of those janky experimental second entries that happened back when the big series were trying to figure out their identities, and I think that carries some interesting stuff along with it. I think the dungeons are cool in concept but they also lead to being perhaps a little too hardcore for the likes of me given how long you can go without a convenient save point in the dang things. Other entries in the series let you save after every map, but you can end up going through what is essentially a gauntlet of maps and then eat shit on the last one.

Speaking of maps… the ones in dungeons are tiny baby maps, while overworld maps tend to be massive and sparse. There’s a lot of turns spent just trying to get your units anywhere near the opposing army so you can do the danged fight, and a lot of maps have nasty hazard tiles. They’re just not super fun to play, is what I’m saying, and I feel like they’re relics of Gaiden map design.

Now the story… that’s the good stuff. Can you believe Berkut’s whole deal was made up for Echoes and he wasn’t in the original game? There’s a lot of really cool stuff about class and really interesting worldbuilding going on here, and I like the cast a lot! Unfortunately I find myself wanting more from the supports, because a lot of the characters have like one partner and therefore don’t get as much exploration as I would like. Also damn all the canon hetero pairings suck except the one that’s intentionally kind of fucked up and maybe Mae and Boey. Even the wife guy and his cool wife are retroactively screwed over by their bad ending slides. You can complain all you like about the dating sim aspects of the modern style games but at least you can angle for an ending that isn’t “this cool knight lady withdrew from society to Be A Wife.”

Also some of the themes are kind of torpedoed by plot points from the original game but like, it’s Fire Emblem, being royalty will always give you superpowers unless you’re Ike, the people’s champion.

I really wanted to love Biomutant. I really did. When it was first announced it seemed to tick all the boxes for an open world adventure game that I would love. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite make the mark.

In Biomutant, you are a small humanoid-ish creature who is trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic Earth, where humans had destroyed the ecosystem, causing creatures to mutate. While the humans are long gone, as long as the ‘Tree of Life’ continues to thrive, all other life on Earth is safe...ish. Unfortunately, four giant creatures, called World Eaters, have decided to go vegetarian and the tree’s roots are their new favourite snack. This is where you come in. You are tasked with tracking down each of these World Eaters and killing them but, in order to do that, you must unite the various tribes to work together to face this threat.

On the surface the plot seems pretty solid. Sure, it is your standard travel-the-world-and-hunt-down-the-threat story but it does the trick. Unfortunately, Biomutant suffers from the usual open world game issue, in which the story does take a backseat to the exploration. In fact, aside from the first couple of hours of the game setting up the story, you don’t get much more added to the story after that. It is essentially the excuse for your character to go and explore the world.

There is a side story which is tied to your past and the fate of your parents. I’ll be honest I wished the developers at Experiment 101 had spent a bit more time on this storyline, as I felt it had the potential to make Biomutant stand out amongst the other open world games. This part of the game also explained what happened to cause the tribes to separate, as well as giving your character an antagonist to oppose. Unfortunately, this whole storyline is introduced at the very beginning and is pretty much forgotten about until the very end; which is a shame, as this could have helped players feel more connected to Biomutant’s world and more invested in saving it.

Speaking of the world of Biomutant, I feel like this is the game’s strongest point. The world is bright and colourful- a complete contrast to other post-apocalyptic games out there. Not only that, but the variety in its environments make it a joy to explore. The game has a range of different environments, ranging from desert to swampland. One of the aspects I really liked was if you went to either a hot or cold area, you had to either have a high enough resistance or wear the right clothes, as you will suffer damage otherwise.There are some assets that are clearly used multiple times but I think for a small development, I think that is OK. The map size is, I feel, the perfect size. It is large enough to justify the term ‘open-world’ but not too large that the world feels empty. At least for myself, the exploration was the best part of the game.

The combat was OK. It wasn’t the best combat I have experienced but it wasn’t the worst. For combat, there are a number of different aspects to it. Firstly, there is the classic melee and ranged combat. For the most part this was OK. You have various combos you can use, which if done successfully gives you the opportunity to use a ‘super’ mode. I didn’t like the lack of control I had on targeting enemies when using ranged weapons. Then there are the mutations. Throughout the game there are bio thingies which you can use to unlock mutations that give you abilities like a bubble which you can stick enemies to. These felt a little gimmicky. Then there are psi powers, which are tied to the karma system. Depending on your karma, you can unlock different powers, like shooting electricity out of your hands. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really use the mutations or psi powers, as the melee was all I really needed. It feels like the developers had several ideas of what they wanted the combat to be- combo focussed, as well as ability focussed and couldn’t decide on which they would go with. This leads to all of the combat systems not being fleshed out. In fact, I had maxed out the skill lines around the same time I reached the half-way point in the game.

The combat could have been much improved if the enemies were a bit more challenging. Basically, if it is a big creature: it will charge you, you will dodge and then hit it. Rinse and repeat. If it is a small creature: it will try and attack you, you will counter the attack and then hit it. Rinse and repeat. There are some variations, such as the small flying enemies but they are few and far between. In fact, the best fights are against the World Eaters, in which you have to use different tactics to take on each one. If there had been a little less repetition with the enemies, this would have gone a long way in making Biomutant a strong open world game.

Finally, we have come to, probably the most divisive part of Biomutant, sound design and voice acting. The developers decided that for the game there would only be three characters that actually speak human: the Narrator, the good karma angel thing and the bad karma devil thing. The two karma entities are brilliant. They remind me of the advisors in the Black & White games. However the Narrator is a little irritating. The voice actor does a brilliant job but the Narrator’s dialogue gets repetitive and dull. At some points, the Narrator was just uttering gibberish that did not reflect what was currently going on in the game. It felt like he had read a whole lot of fortune cookie fortunes and decided to impart his new found knowledge on the player. This wouldn’t be too bad if there were other characters you could speak to. However the developers decided everyone else was going to talk in their own Sim-like language. I completely understand the design choice, after all it does make sense that these creatures would have their own language; but if you are playing this game for thirty plus hours, this nonsensical dialogue can start to grate. In the end, I started to listen to podcasts and music, rather than listen to the game.

Overall, Biomutant was an ambitious game. It is clear that the developers had the best intentions and wanted to create the best open world game possible. However, I feel like their ambition got the better of them which leaves the game lacking a strong strong or combat system. It is not the worst open world game, not by a long shot but it certainly isn’t one of the best. I would definitely be interested in what Experiment 101 creates next but as for Biomutant, I would only recommend it to open world fans or if it was selling at around £30-£35.

It's kinda... endearingly shitty? It's like a child's idea of what would be the best video game ever made: a completely absurd (and aggressively formulaic) mashup of your favorite elements from every other game, with no regard for how they interact with one another. There are dungeons, farming, cooking, a pokemon capture/breeding system that lets you breed anything with a health bar and pathfinding AI, base building, and it's so goofy and disjointed that the only real goals in the game do not even bother with making you touch these systems at all (literally).

It's mostly a strange experience because it's all like, 75% complete, spread evenly across every element of the game. You could spend all your time fishing and cooking, but for some reason there are like three core ingredients you can only get by breaking boxes on the beach, of which there is a finite, non-respawning number. Item descriptions are clearly machine translated but understandable, save for ~15% of items where the description is either still in Japanese, completely indecipherable English, or so vague that it may as well not exist. If it felt like progress meant anything in this game, I would almost be frustrated by how many times I've used a ridiculous amount of rare resources to build some mysterious rainbow-colored orb that seems to do literally nothing when placed/thrown.

It is a game made by people who very clearly love video games and very clearly have no idea what makes a good game work. There are games out there with satirical mechanics meant to parody time-wasting games, and yet none of them are as effective as Craftopia, which prompts you to do things like "craft one THOUSAND automated furnaces and cast them into the void" to permanently gain... +0.1 MATK.

And yet, I feel like it's worth noting that the game has never crashed. It's janky, but never has the experience completely fallen apart for me, despite this horrendous mess of features. I have done some really stupid shit, including breeding an entire farm of Anubis (the god), who exists on an island in the sky solely to help you gain permanent stat buffs, and the game never stopped me. Everything that is present works well enough that it's at least fun-adjacent if you can rope a particularly foolish person into joining you. I absolutely do not recommend any part of this experience, least of all if you have to exchange legal tender for the opportunity.

the game was fun for the first 5 hours, then the rest was like a different game entirely to me. this could be due to how before my first full playthrough i had only reached the first bowser fight on multiple different attempts, with no real effort to ever reach the end, or due to it maybe just being not that great.

in 2020 the divisive 3D all-stars package released and i could finally play the game conveniently on my switch. i had a good time overall, but the odd difficulty of certain level missions got me wondering if everyone's in agreement that the second half is badly designed or if i am, once again, bad at games.

i haven't tried since this first run, and so i feel my judgment isn't fully accurate, but i did want to get every star in the game and by the time i reached the credits after obtaining only the required amount of stars, i didn't feel like collecting the extra 50 or so.

a classic game however, revolutionary, great for speedrunning, but not one i would want to 100% complete without extra time and practise.

There is a reason this game and its predecessor have such a following behind it. The Room Two is a point-and-click puzzle game where you solve contraption boxes to clear a room. This time, the new addition is that you can move around the room and tackle multiple contraptions at once, leading to much broader puzzles. I love the heavy emphasis on story, and the slight increase in content over the first game. The music and the visuals are still great, and the simple click controls on PC are really fun and engaging. The only true issue I found during my three hour runtime was that sometimes if the room was too big, it was hard to tell where exactly an item should go, but I only ran into this problem twice, and it can be solved if you turn the hint system on. Excellent game, would reccomend you play the original first, then come and give this game your time and money.