Style is amazing as hell from the cutscenes to the pixel art, plus there's a thumping OST in there. Full eyes, full ears, mid game.

I was pretty pumped for this one but can't help other than feel utterly let down by the actual gameplay itself. It's decent enough but over the 5-6 hour runtime, despite some pretty cool platforming ideas, it doesn't ever truly break out of the box in a way that is exciting or satisfying, nor does it scratch the metroidvania itch very well, as everything is pretty much discoverable on your first time through.

There are also some...interesting...design/balance choices. You have a health/energy bar which refills by hitting enemies, or when you hit zero you can regen some. You also have to use this bar to damage certain enemies, which honestly, I think is a pretty cool idea. However, the rate at which you lose/gain back energy/health is weirdly disproportionate.

In one boss fight, you can only trigger a damage phase on the boss by hitting him with a special attack that drains your energy. However, the rate at which you regen this energy from hitting the boss, as well as his projectiles, is not enough for what you actually need for the fight. The solution is in a damage phase to pause actually doing damage in order to dump all of your energy/health to zero and then use the regen ability to get enough back. This is incredibly backwards and weird and feels much more like an oversight in encounter balancing than a purposeful strategy.

9 Years of Shadow has the outline of a fantastic game but unfortunately it comes off like a term paper written at the eleventh hour - the introduction and main ideas are fantastic but...shit, it's due at midnight so let's throw this conclusion on there, a few block quotes, make those periods into 16-pt font, and pray that 9 and 2/3rds pages will count for 10. Have we tried bolding the title?

A 3D coloring book with the least functional multiplayer I’ve ever experienced in a video game.

The basic gameplay loop of Powerwash Sim is more fun and relaxing than I thought it would be. It’s a pretty zen and satisfying experience to clean a bunch of dirt off stuff. This experience would be made even better by doing it with friends, yet I cannot think of a better multiplayer game that is so uninterested in being a multiplayer game.

I have never, in my life, played a video game with such poorly made or optimized multiplayer as the multiplayer in Powerwash Simulator. I was floored with how bad it is. Firstly, progress is only tracked for the host. So if you’re hoping to play through the campaign with a friend, you’ll have to accept that you won’t unlock anything or progress your own game. The game is built as a single player experience first.

Let’s say you do decide to do one of the bonus missions with a group of friends. Good luck getting the gang together. It took us 30 minutes just to get all 4 of us into one game thanks to frequent connection issues coupled with offensively long loading screens. Once you do get in the game together, prepare to deal with obscene lag and sync issues. Throughout the game, you and your friends’ games will slowly get more and more out-of-sync. In their game, they’d see us cleaning a spot that we cleaned 15-20 minutes prior. By the end of our mission, my friends were over 25 minutes behind my game. I got the “Mission Complete” screen and we sat there for 20 minutes waiting for their games to catch up before getting bored and quitting.

This feels maybe nitpicky, but it would be cool if the game actually had some physics to it other than the water and dirt physics. I was a bit disappointed to find that the entire environment is basically a rendered static space. Anything you might expect would move like flowers, grass, windmills, etc, doesn’t. It’s a 3D coloring book and nothing more.

To add insult to injury, they keep dropping new content for the game while ignoring the issues that have been plaguing the game since launch. There are Reddit posts that are 2 years old complaining about the same issues we’re experiencing now. Fix your broken-ass game before adding Spongebob Squarepants to it.

If you want a game to play alone while you listen to a podcast or zone out, I’m sure Powerwash Simulator will do just fine, but I was pretty disappointed with how poorly-made the game was overall. It would be such a cool multiplayer experience to hang and clean with friends. Sadly, the multiplayer is genuinely the worst-made multiplayer I’ve ever experienced in a video game both in functionality and in optimization.

+ Cleaning can feel satisfying I guess
+ Probably a good podcast game or something

- Environments are static and lack any physics. It’s basically a 3D coloring book
- The most poorly-made, poorly-optimized multiplayer of all time. Don’t even bother
- UI controls on console are quite bad
- Can get tedious
- Finding the last 1% to finish a level or trying to find the tiniest dirt spec on a small part sucks
- Devs keep dropping new content while ignoring the bugs plaguing the game

A choose-your-own-adventure-like about running border patrol for a fantasy city where the joy is in the journey and the choices you make along the way.

In Lil Guardsman, you play as a 12-year-old girl working your dad’s shift at the city’s guard shack. You’re basically ye olde immigration officer and you need to decide who to let in, deny, or throw in jail using a bunch of tools to interrogate people. Depending on which tools and interactions you use, and what you decide to do with the people, your outcome will be completely different. Some levels I replayed 4-5 times and was able to see new dialogue every time. My only gripe with the game is that it grades you based on how “well” you performed during these interactions. It’s tricky because the game is built in such a way that encourages experimenting and trying weird stuff to see multiple results, but then it penalizes you if you make the wrong choices which sometimes works against my desire to tell my own wacky tale. The story framing for this is that you are an employee of the city and they’re grading you based on your performance before paying you accordingly. It all makes sense in the scope of the story; I just sometimes wish I had a little more freedom to mess around. Thankfully, there’s always more than one way to get good marks from your employer so it doesn’t ever shove you into a box.

Throughout the story, you’ll make a number of choices that often feel monumental in how you are shaping the lives of the people in the city, only to realize that every ending is, more or less, the same based on a couple of critical choices. Much like almost any “your decision matters” choice-based games like Mass Effect, Life is Strange, the Telltale games, or a number of other titles, you really need to embrace the logic of “it’s about the journey not the destination”. I played this with a group for Book Club For Games and, yes, most of our endings were extremely similar, but every single one of us had totally different choices and experiences along the way, so all of our stories felt different despite our similar endings.

The real star of Lil Guardsman is the writing - ranging from heartfelt to hilarious, while throwing in the occasional commentary and 4th-wall-breaking joke. At its most basic, reduced form, Lil Guardsman is just a choose-your-own-adventure game, but it excels at what it does because of the writing. I cared about the characters and their silly little politics, and often found myself laughing out loud at the jokes. If you’re able to sit back and enjoy the chaotic ride of playing a 12-year-old girl who has way more responsibility than she should, I think you’ll really enjoy Lil Guardsman.

+ Writing is consistently fun, witty, and often quite funny with great characters
+ Fun variety in dialogue that encourages replaying some sections here and there
+ Impressive amount of consideration had to go into every possible choice and bit of dialogue that results from those choices
+ Great voice acting

- Getting judged on your choices sometimes feels antithetical to the spirit of making your own choices
- No mid-level saves means restarting the whole chapter if your game crashes
- Having to replay the second half of the game 4 times to get all the trophies when there’s not that much variety in said endings sucks

Speed-daters ranked by how much I'd want to play this game with them:

1. Spooky Peter (He'd be a riot)
2. Dave (Pure positivity)
3. Gary (I don't think it'd help him, but I have to try)
4. Hattie (She's nice!)
5. Stephanie (She needs something to do)
6. Andy (Would arguably the best commentator)
7. Agatha (Same reason as Gary, but less desperate)
8. Vera (I think she might hate it)
9. Leon (He'd definitely hate it)
10. Kyo (They don't need this stress, bless their heart)
11. Drea (I think they might hate me)
12. Riley (Bye Riley)

Cute game! I wish there was more art, a lot of situations are just described without showing anything. At the very least, a background image for the dates would have gone a long way. But most of all, I truly feel bad for not being able to help Gary more. That poor guy.

lo-fi mushrooming with your granny to vibe/chill to 2016

A delightful little thing. Looks and sounds nice. The writing is sparse but what there is is very well done. A wonderful experience all around.

(This was in the itchio Palestinian Aid bundle as well as the Racial Justice bundle so you probably already own this, as well!)